By Geno McGahee
OK, let me get this out of the way immediately. The CGI in this movie is about as bad as it gets, but despite the ridiculous look of the enormous Sasquatch, this SyFy made for TV movie isn’t all that bad.
We have Danny Bonaduce as “Harley Anderson,” an arrogant radio disc jockey that is planning an outdoor contest and ignoring all of the signs that he shouldn’t. He has knocked down trees to set up for the show and that has irritated the mighty Bigfoot. Bigfoot isn’t the only thing that has gotten bothered by Anderson’s antics. Simon Quint (Barry Williams) is a former singer turned activist that wants to save Mother Nature and has been chaining himself to the equipment to stop the further destruction of the forest.
Immediately, watching this, I thought of GRIZZLY 2: THE CONCERT, where a concert is held and a huge (and I mean huge) Grizzly attacks. The difference is that Grizzly 2 didn’t have to use angles and tight shots to make it look like they had a packed house. It literally looked like 10 people went to this Anderson concert.
The star attraction at the concert is Alice Cooper and it was pretty obvious that they couldn’t get the rights to any of his songs. Generic metal is played in the background as Cooper fist pumps over and over again. It becomes awkward and then when Bigfoot kills Cooper, he says something along the lines of being the scariest thing at the concert. Cooper, as awesome as he is, was terrible in this and very annoying.
There’s a lot of focus on the relationship between Simon and Harley and their checkered past, but it pretty much sucks. Bonaduce is unlikable and unbelievable in the role, which is odd because I think that he was a DJ for some time. Barry Williams plays the role well, but he’s whiney and hard to root for.
The Bigfoot kills a lot of people and chomps off their heads like the video game RAMPAGE, and realistically, the special effects are about as good as a 1980’s video game at times. If you can get beyond the terrible CGI, you may come to like the character Bigfoot. It was the best character in the film and, in the end, I was able to accept the terrible mess that the movie was from a production standpoint and just sat back and tried to enjoy the fun factor. The makers of this knew that they didn’t have a great script, so they supplemented it with a lot of the Sasquatch going apeshit. It was a good call.
The movie doesn’t take itself too seriously and if you do the same, then you may not hate this. I don’t know if you will like it, but you won’t want SyFy chased out of town for making it. I recommend this if you can see it for free and if you love Bigfoot.
Rating: 5.5/10…hey, it could have been worse.
